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Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft, and Design

Posted on January 2, 2009 by | Comments Off

Click on the image to purchase this book through Amazon.com. Purchases help support MediaMouse.org.

From Portland to Milwaukee to Ypsilanti, a new wave of do-it-yourself art, craft, and design is, and has been, emerging across the nation. Intertwining interviews of crafters from all areas of the nation with photos of their work, Faythe Levine and Cortney Heimerl compile the ever so timely book, Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft, and Design.

Upon skimming through the brightly-colored glossy pages, we see photo after photo of young emerging artists showing off their handiwork. Lampwork beads, handmade shoes, latch-hook rugs, refurbished jewelry, altered clothing, and knitted purses are exhibited by twenty-four crafters. Through interviews, they all share their inspiring stories of how independent (also known as “indie”) craft has impacted their lives.

With blogs, forums, and craft websites hopping with both makers and buyers, many indie crafters have transformed small projects, which at one point started from sitting on their bedroom floors cross-stitching, has now turned into an underground economy from which many are able to make their living. A dream come true for some of the crafters featured; the ability to combine their passion and skill to create and make money doing what they love, drives them – for others, it is a reclamation of the creativity and uniqueness that they feel is stripped from our society by corporate influence and uniformity, that makes them flourish in the art. As Andrew Wagner states in his essay entitled “Craft: It’s What You Make of It” he says “Making your own clothes, your own dinnerware, your own art has become a way to politely (or maybe not so politely) give ‘the man’ the middle finger, for lack of a better term.”

Wagner’s reaction to the rise of the indie craft revolution perhaps best envelopes many of the feelings the twenty-four crafters share about their community. So whether they intend to or not, these crafters are stabbing capitalism in the heart by outwardly refusing to participate in the corporate economy while supporting their own independent market that eliminates mass production, the “middle man”, and may also take the form trading goods and eliminating any or all currency in their transactions.

Even someone completely foreign to the world of indie craft will instantly notice the complete turn-around of what makes this form of craft different from their grandmother’s. While many of these crafters borrow old traditions, what they are creating is something drastically different and completely new.

Throughout the text, Levine and Heimerl intersperse other crafters’ wisdom through short essay-like segments which give much insight into the many varying interpretations of what craft is, how it can be used as a catalyst for social change, the Internet and its affects on craft culture and business, to craft as a therapeutic and even spiritual form.

Handmade Nation makes it immediately obvious that in this particular world of craft, the medium, the creativity, and the ideas, know no boundaries and the empowering underlying message: anyone can do this.

Faythe Levine and Cortney Heimerl, Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY, Art, Craft, and Design, (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008).

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Art Cooperative Closes its Doors

Posted on December 28, 2007 by | 1 Comment
daac logo

Last night, the Division Avenue Arts Cooperative (DAAC), a venue for independent music and art in downtown Grand Rapids was visited by the Grand Rapids Fire Prevention Bureau. According to the Grand Rapids Press, the fire inspector who visited the site said that 143 people were in the venue, exceeding its 100-person capacity. Additional violations were also reportedly found, although they were not specified in the article published in the Press.

The DAAC had the following announcement on its website from long time DAAC volunteer Jeff Vandenberg:

“R.I.P. D.A.A.C.

OCTOBER 29 2004 – DECEMBER 27 2007

Well, the mighty hand of bureaucracy finally came down on us last night.

Apparently, some kid’s parents called the fire marshal on us for being over capacity. They wrote us up for several violations, and said I can expect calls from various other city inspectors today. I do not believe this is a battle we can win (or afford) so this is it, the end of an era. All shows are canceled. Thanks to everyone who played or booked or came to shows. It’s kind of amazing we made it over 4 years.”

The DAAC will no doubt be missed, as it had a long history of hosting a variety of independent cultural events including art exhibits, independent music concerts, and movie showings. Unlike other music venues in Grand Rapids, the DAAC was run cooperatively and emphasized the inherent value of art–whether music or otherwise–over profit. In its four years of existence, the DAAC hosted hundreds of musical events by local and national touring bands covering a wide range of music.

While there are no plans to open again at the current site, there is discussion about the future of the DAAC. The website G-Rad.org has an ongoing discussion about the DAAC on its forum. Moreover, there is a meeting planned for Saturday, January 5 at 12:00pm at Foodsmith (122 S. Division Ave.) to discuss the future of the DAAC.

For more on the history of the DAAC, there is an article on the venue on the Grand Rapids wiki Viget.org.

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Beehive Collective Discusses Art as Organizing at GVSU

Posted on October 17, 2007 by | Comments Off
beehive design collective graphic

Today, the Beehive Design Collective discussed how they use art as an organizing tool at an afternoon lecture at Grand Valley State University (GVSU) in Allendale. The Collective and their art has circulated extensively within the anti-globalization movement and this is the Beehive’s third time visiting West Michigan.

Rather than talking about the Collective’s “graphics campaigns“–which the Collective uses as means of popular education to explain complex processes in society from biotechnology to free trade agreements–the Collective focused on how they have been able to use their art as an organizing tool. The Collective, which will also be appearing tomorrow night in Grand Rapids, explained briefly that its work is the product of extensive touring and research with people around North America and Latin America. Their art is produced as black-and-white pen and ink drawings and are designated as “anti-copyright” with the hope that activists and organizers will use them as a tool to educate their communities. They emphasized that over the past seven years of the Collective’s evolution their graphics have begun to emphasize story-telling via visual narratives with the goal of breaking down complex issues–trade, drug war, agricultural policy–and making them easily understandable for people that either speak a different language or are not literate.

The Collective told the audience that they got their start around seven years ago after a Collective member circulated a flyer at the 2000 World Bank/IMF protest searching for artists to contribute to a stone mosaic project. Since that time, the Collective has expanded and its major focus is now on “graphics campaigns.” The Collective has distributed over 60,000 posters via touring and donations to community groups, emphasizing the importance of person-to-person interaction and popular education presentations instead of selling them in stores. The Collective also recently acquired a new house in Maine that has allowed it to become a bit more structured and centralized as a Collective rather than the autonomous structure that characterized its early years.

The Collective’s work has grown in scope over its history from one of its earliest projects advertising a “BioDevestation” event in Boston to its current project on Plan Puebla Panama. A significant change has been a shift from text-heavy art to including minimal amounts of text in order to facilitate a cross-cultural dialog. The Collective’s Free Trade Areas of the Americas (FTAA) campaign was its first step in this direction, with the goal being to explain the complexities in free trade agreements to audiences. The group used the campaign to promote the 2003 FTAA protests in Miami, as well as offering it to the activists that gathered in Miami to bring back to their communities as a means of explaining what was at stake with the FTAA.

The Collective’s next campaign was a graphic focusing on Plan Columbia. This was the first time the Collective sought to incorporate a distinct narrative framework. The graphic tells the story of Andean Region from the conquest over 500 years ago to the present, explaining that the same colonial mindset persists. It specifically tells the story of “Plan Colombia” and the United States drug war and how they threaten to displace traditional ways. The graphic is based on dialog between the Collective and people living in the Andean region and not only tells the devastating effects of Plan Colombia but also celebrates resistance and indigenous ways. Moreover, all of the plants and animals in the graphic–which the Collective uses in order to challenge people not to look for themselves in the art and to overcome concerns about stereotyping–are specific to the Andean bio-region.

While the Collective has been working on its Plan Puebla Panama graphic for four years, it has also done a number of other projects for the Latin American Solidarity Conference, on climate change and climate justice, and for the Maine Social Forum.

The Collective concluded by saying that the theme that connects all of its work is an intense love of using the small to explain the larger picture and the relationship between the microcosm and macrocosm. Their technique of using visual art to explain complex social and political issues is a welcome and much-needed shift from the text-heavy and often dense analysis that is so common on the left.

The Beehive Collective will be appearing tomorrow night (Thursday) at the Urban Institute for the Contemporary Arts (UICA) at 7:30pm. The UICA is located at 41 Sheldon SE in downtown Grand Rapids.

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Interview with Local Graffiti Website

Posted on May 21, 2007 by | Comments Off

graffiti in grand rapids (photo)

The website Equalized.org has been part of a project documenting graffiti art in Grand Rapids since May of 2003. With the project reaching the four-year mark, a Media Mouse contributor conducted the following interview with Equalized.org.

Now that your project has reached four years, it seems appropriate to reflect on both the original impetus for the project as well as evaluating its success or failure. What were the original goals for the project and how successful do you feel it has been?

Equalized.org was really born in late 2002 out of conversations that some former graffiti artists and friends were having about the history of the graffiti scene in Grand Rapids and how much of our collective history had been covered up by the city’s streets and sanitation department. Following these conversations, a few of the folks started going out and taking pictures and uploading them to a free website service. This was done with the understanding that if we did not document this subculture, its history would be written by the media and the police, neither of which were going to portray graffiti in a favorable or even realistic way.

With relatively little advertising, the site launched in May of 2003, coinciding with a significant increase in graffiti starting in the spring and summer of 2003 and running through the summer of 2004. The initial small group more or less fell apart after folks left town, but the project has continued with the help of folks that contribute photographs.

Aside from documenting graffiti and street art, we certainly hoped that it would encourage a more sympathetic and understanding view of graffiti among the larger community in Grand Rapids. With respect to that goal, the project has certainly failed because there has been little effort to advertise the site and it is consequently visited primarily by graffiti and street artists in and outside of Grand Rapids.

Another hope was that the site would facilitate an increase in quality of graffiti art in Grand Rapids, but I would say that effort has failed as well. I’m not sure how much influence we can really have on artists, especially given the distance that we maintain from the scene (we don’t do graffiti or street art), but we had hoped that having a collection of pictures to compare oneself to would encourage artists to improve.

One of the things that we have been interested in is the way in which the local media has reported on graffiti in Grand Rapids. Could you comment on that and discuss any interactions that you have had with the media?

We have received a number of requests from the media, many of which centered on the “graffiti crackdown” in 2005. Various local media outlets wanted us to get them in touch with some of the more hyped artists in the media, specifically MEEK and REN. Even if we had known who those artists were, we would not have given their information to the media. We emailed back and forth with a reporter from the Grand Rapids Press who asked us to respond to a bunch of erroneous information that he had received from the Grand Rapids Police Department for a follow-up story on graffiti in Grand Rapids in the wake of the arrests of five artists. The reporter was unwilling to quote us and instead ran a sensationalized story blaming “punkers” for graffiti and relying exclusively on the police perspective.

Overall, graffiti has been portrayed in a sensationalized manner with stories giving the impression that the community is under attack by graffiti artists. Of course, this is ridiculous on a number of different levels, both in terms of the actual prevalence of graffiti, which really is not very widespread, as well as in relation to other social problems. Other issues affecting urban Grand Rapids including racism, homelessness, and gentrification, all of which are a much greater threat to people living within the city are largely ignored. Instead, we get the semi-annual articles on the news explaining that “taggers” are defacing property left and right. It’s not to too surprising, as these anti-graffiti stories fit into an overall media context of hyping crime, scaring viewers, and criminalizing youth.

None of these stories have talked about the origins of graffiti or its connections to hip-hop culture.

Have you had much interaction with local law enforcement? Have they shown any interest in the site?

No, we have had no interaction with local law enforcement. We know they look at the site based on our website logs and comments they have made in the media, but we have not had any contact with them. There was a blogger over at G-RAD.ORG who was stopped by the police and questioned about graffiti for taking pictures downtown, but we have never been subjected to the same treatment.

You mentioned that the local media has ignored the historical context from which graffiti emerged. Could you talk a little bit about this history? I think a lot of people see graffiti simply as random scribbles rather than as a distinct subculture with a number of unique identifying features.

Graffiti started in the 1970s on the east coast, with the first artists emerging in Philadelphia or New York City, I’ve not seen a definitive statement as to where it actually began. At any rate, graffiti grew into what it is today in New York City, where artists painted on subway trains and abandoned buildings, developing the various stylistic elements that exist to this day–”tags,” “throw-ups,” and “pieces”–each of which have their own conventions within the graffiti scene. Graffiti came into prominence in New York City as a component of the emerging hip-hop culture, being one of the “four elements” of that scene, joining break dancing, DJing, and rapping. Hip-hop as a whole emerged out of a rapidly changing urban community in New York City, particularly around the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway and the resulting displacement. Of course, this history is rarely related in stories about graffiti.

In looking at social movements around the world and in the United States, there is a history of movements using graffiti and street art as a means of political expression. However, it seems like graffiti in Grand Rapids does not have a relationship to any political movement. Does such a relationship exist and why?

Graffiti and street art in Grand Rapids is by and large not political. You might see the occasional anti-Bush stencil, but for the most part, there is no connection to politics. You could argue that graffiti and street art are inherently political because they challenge concepts of property and ownership, redefine public space, and are an oppositional subculture, but making such a statement would be pretty dishonest. For the most part, graffiti in Grand Rapids has no roots in politics.

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Chilean Scholar Discusses Art as Resistance during the Pinochet Dictatorship

Posted on March 3, 2007 by | Comments Off

On Thursday, March 1 Grand Valley State University’s Latin American Studies department hosted a presentation by Chilean scholar Gonzalo Leiva on the Allendale campus. The title of Dr. Leiva’s talk was “A Historical Cultural Imaginary of the Chilean Military Dictatorship 1973 – 1989.” He presented part of a three-year research project that he and some of his colleagues were conducting that looked at certain cultural elements during the Pinochet regime. The dictatorship was intolerant of many art forms and was resisted by numerous artists who created “subversive art.” He stated that their research project was a form of “visual memory.”

Before discussing what he called the “4 phases of the imaginary of the dictatorship,” he addressed the Allende government and cultural expression.

Under Allende there was what he termed “visual memory and the visual unity.” Allende is usually referred to as a Marxist, but it was a new form of Marxism that was much more artistic and imaginary. He was elected by popular vote and adapted similar language of the Cuban revolution, like the term Venceremos, which translates to “We Shall Overcome.” He showed an example of a poster of a boy at 8 with the Venceremos statement. After the coup this boy, who was known as the Venceremos boy was tortured and killed at age 11. Then he showed the audience a whole new aesthetic with the Pinochet dictatorship, consisting mostly of military images, weaponry, and Pinochet with the flag. Primarily, the presentation consisted of what Dr. Leiva called the “4 phases of the imaginary of the dictatorship.” Note: The Allende government was overthrown with the assistance of the US government and the CIA. There is now substantial documentation on the US role in this coup.

Phase I (1973-75) – This phase included a cleansing process, particularly of Marxism, which was seen as a disease. The methods used were torture, exile, murder and a curfew. A new economic model began with an emphasis on the external. It began by targeting those in the Allende administration – with an element of gender stereotypes, where men were prohibited to have long hair and women could not have pants. This authoritarianism gets played out at the university level and other cultural centers. There was most certainly censorship of the media. He provided and example of a Chilean artist who was critical of the Pinochet government, who was arrested and sent into exile, which demonstrated the intolerance of the new regime.

Phase II (1976 – 83) – This phase was the beginning of the neo-liberal model with the assistance of Chicago University Professor Milton Friedman. This was a period where the bodies of many people who had disappeared during the early years of the regime were discovered. The dictatorship could no longer deny what had been done. This is also the time that the first demonstrations against the regime had began, with organized political opposition by 1982. One artistic example was the work of Luz Donoso and Hernan Parada who did an exhibit in the main street with images of the disappeared and TVs. From 1977-79 a collective of artists come together that had as a metaphor for it’s artistic expression a thread, to show that their work “sewed people together who had been torn apart from the violence.” There was also the work of Eugenio Dittborn who addressed the violence of the state without talking about it directly. He used images of torture techniques and images of people died decades earlier.

Phase III (1983-85) In this phase there is a strong institutionalization of the regime with changes if the constitution and laws. It was also a crisis period where the economy starts to fail and things like soup kitchens and street people appear. There were also beginning efforts at an international level to prosecute Pinochet. The dictatorship tries to use Chilean history to justify the present. For example, a Chilean named Portales who was the first to advocate for a military, his image was used to promote Pinochet’s regime, in the same way that Russia used the image of Lenin. You also see new organizations like social and human rights groups in the country during this period. Pinochet called for a plebiscite, but lost the election and eventually stepped down.

Phase IV (1985-90) – During the fourth phase a new collective of artists came to together to document with photography the past 15 years of the dictatorship. Professor Leiva focuses on several female photographers. He talks about a women named Leonora Vicuna who only photographed in black and white, since she believed Chile is a grey society. She then painted on top of the photos to communicate what she wanted the country to be. She looked at everyday life for many people as well as the view of Indigenous populations. Another photographer Paz Errazuriz, looked at all the hidden places and people of Chile. She did work photographing the mentally ill. She also looked at trans-gender people and the elderly. One last artist is Hellen Hugues, an American from California who worked with a solidarity group. Her most important work is around the curfew and the repression directed at people who protested publicly.

He concluded by saying that “there was substantial artistic expression against the repression.” Many artists who rejected the Pinochet regime they either went into exile or formed collectives to resist the dictatorship. In many ways their work was a set of metaphors for the dictatorships and that the repression of the dictatorship was defeated in some ways by this subversive artistic expression.

We also interviewed Professor Leiva after his lecture about other forms of art as resistance in Chile, what artists are doing since the death of Pinochet, the exile Chilean community, and the role that Milton Friedman played in shaping the Chilean economy. The interview is in Spanish.

Listen to the Interview

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Crimes Of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality

Posted on April 28, 2003 by | Comments Off

Click on the image to purchase this book through Amazon.com. Purchases help support MediaMouse.org.

Jeff Ferrell’s Crimes Of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality is an intriguing and well-researched look into the social, aesthetic, and criminal aspects of the graffiti subculture in Denver, Colorado. Unlike many other books on the subject that have the simple documentation of the art form as their goal, Ferrell aims at achieving a complete understanding of the graffiti subculture, both of the subculture’s characteristics and society’s criminalization of graffiti. Moreover, Ferrell’s willingness to both participate in the subculture on its own terms and his ability to realistically analyze the culture, make it the best book I have read on the subject of graffiti art.

The first half of the book describes the graffiti subculture, covering the various art forms, for example, discussing the differences between pieces and throw-ups, the logistical aspects of writing graffiti–how some crews paint and how people tag, and discussing the social and communicative aspects of graffiti, such as the relationships between people in the graffiti scene and the way in which art functions as a form of communication connecting the subculture. While the book is centered on the somewhat unlikely location of Denver, in that Denver is not well-known for its graffiti scene, much of the discussion is universal enough that it remains relevant for people wanting to learn more about the graffiti scene as a whole. Ferrell relies on both his firsthand experience and numerous interviews with graffiti artists to develop his discussion of the graffiti scene. Of the books I have read on graffiti, Crimes of Style is the most balanced–at once capturing the allure of writing graffiti while remaining realistic in assessing the subculture’s limitations.

The second half of the book focuses on the criminalization of graffiti, by looking at the efforts of the city of Denver to criminalize graffiti and in the final chapter, presenting a framework for which this criminalization can be understood. Ferrell develops the idea of “anarchist criminology” to explain why city officials in Denver find graffiti to be such a threat, as it seems unlikely that city officials could consider people spray painting artwork on walls and other surfaces as a threat to the power structure. While Ferrell never makes the case that graffiti is directly threatening the governmental power structure, the analysis of graffiti culture from within the framework of anarchism is quite useful, as it allows one to address the ways in which graffiti is fundamentally challenging–the disregard for private property, its participation in the debate between what constitutes private space and the best use of that space, and the frequent glorification of criminality within the subculture. It would be easy for Ferrell to project a political context onto graffiti that is not there, as many academics do when they drone on about how subcultures are a manifestation of various cultural and political theories. To his credit, Ferrell does not do this, remaining cognizant of the fact that most writers do not see graffiti as fitting into some greater political framework. Nevertheless, his theorizing is intriguing and its analysis is beneficial to understanding the subculture, and perhaps more importantly, in the event that graffiti writers read this book, it may encourage them to develop a more comprehensive analysis of the potentiality of their actions.

As a result of his actual participation in the graffiti subculture, Ferrell is able to keep Crimes of Style from being a dull academic monograph written from the distant confines of the university milieu–over-analyzing a subculture and stripping it of its vitality–a phenomenon which is all to common in academic treatments of subcultures. Consequently, Crimes of Style is an interesting read for both those who are involved in or are interested in getting involved in the graffiti subculture, as well as academics who are approaching the subject from an interest in cultural studies or criminology.

Jeff Ferrell, Crimes Of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality, (Northeastern University Press, 1996).

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